Walmart resurrects the M1 MacBook Air as an entry-level $699 laptop

Price undercuts Apple's own refurbished pricing for the M1 Air.

See full article...

 

[Ed1024]

Apple clearly sanctioned this sale, as even the sales artwork uses Apple assets. Maybe Apple decided they want a more aggressive approach in the under $1 market but not on their 'official' store. Till now Apple fed grey market channels 'hush-hush'.

I think it’s a combination of many factors. They are likely be making a decent margin as the tooling, R&D, etc. has all been amortised fully by now and even the silicon is using an older node than the later M-series. Don’t underestimate how much this is a gateway drug into the Apple ecosystem either, as it’s reached the impulse-buy level for many and the M1 Air has a reputation most tech companies would kill for in one of their products.

Apple generally take a longer term view, and having a new customer who might upgrade in 3-4 years time is regarded as a big win, especially as they can expect income from services like iCloud and the rest during that period. It’s difficult to see any downsides, apart from those who might have bought an M2 or M3 Air deciding that a M1 is plenty good enough for their needs. Still another customer into the fold, though...

 

[Deleted member 545801]

So you never have any issues with the SSD or fragile screen glass or general slowness. I guess that’s just localized to my very specific and unique local community — and I guess the only other place I see that is online on most of the Mac repair video channels. But not where you are, of course, that’s the exception

Shockingly, if you specifically look at repair channels where people are exclusively dealing with broken hardware, you're going to see a lot of broken hardware.

 

[Me Myself And I1]

Shit, for $700 that's a pretty decent deal for a laptop that's going to be used for browsing the web. That's pretty close to "fuck it, I just want to play with one" price.

E: I'm being sincere. My wife has been wanting a new laptop and everything she does on her laptop is done in a browser. She has a beefy desktop for anything else. This would be a great replacement for her dying Chromebook.

That M1 Air is still more powerfull than most PC laptops at that price.

 

[gnasher729]

Any Intel Mac available? Yes and no. Did Apple spend the last 2 years before releasing the M1 by hamstringing and demolishing the performance ceiling of their Intel laptops? Yes they did. Demonstrably so, history shows how much of a shit show 2016-2020 was for MacBooks/airs and MacBook Pros. Scissorgate, SSD failures, horrible drivers on launch, terrible thermals etc.

Now was the M1 air faster than a 2019/18 MB Air, maybe, probably in most M1 calibrated/ software compatible benchmarks. But was it faster than the MBP Intel 2019 with a GPU? No.

But you said ‘any’. So stands to reason you meant any MacBook

I wrote a very specific benchmark that ran twice as fast on my iPhone XR (two performance cores, the other cores add very little) than on my 2015 Intel iMac (quad core, no hyperthreading). Admittedly it did lots of floating point square roots and divisions, where ARM beats the shit out of anything Intel made.

 

[gnasher729]

You misspelled "running more child sweatshops than anyone else".

So, in the end, Apple was BSing and the choir picked it up strongly ? You don't say...

It’s well known what contracts apple has with Chinese companies. Hire anyone under 16, and the Chinese company has to send them back to school including paying for it. That’s also the case for “historic” cases, that is if someone gets hired at fifteen and is sixteen when it’s found out. Hiring someone under 16 doesn’t save any money, because if you paid them less, the state and then apple would find out. Usually audits find one or two kids that slipped through. Lots of fifteen year olds like making money. Once in a while they find more, and some Chinese company finds its contract cancelled. If they find one or two, these kids turn out to be a lot more expensive than 16 year olds.

So if they hire someone who is 15 years and six months and find out a year later, they have paid full salary, then they have to pay school for six months and the normal salary for six months. With nothing to show for it.

 

[DovePig]

$699 at £1=$1.27 = £550
+VAT at 20% =£660
Shipped via freight forwarder in Florida, no US sales tax
let's guess package weight at 2kg
Freight forwarding ~$60 = £57 inc VAT (need to check insurance)
Total £716

Cheapest M2 MBA from Apple £999

Still a good deal...

Not really. You forgot to add customs.

You can still buy new M1 Air in Europe on sale from independent retailers, just like from Walmart. I saw some for 800€ a month ago. The more usual price right now is around 850€ (£730), which is pretty comparable to your quote, but without all that forwarding hassle. And unlike the grey import from US, you get the full two year minimum warranty on it.

 

[orwelldesign]

. Go for it, but for every use case?

Nice straw man, bubbelah.

No one said that. No one said anything close to that. Emphasis added. No one said every but you.

My base M1 is the best laptop I've ever owned for doing laptop stuff. Like "not being tethered to 110VAC" kinda stuff or "I'm nowhere near where I'm supposed to be working, but still getting work done" kinda stuff.

They are great. They are more than adequate for most users. If you're not that user, you already know it. The people who are like "yeah my fanless Air won't do power user stuff" are dumb, because they shouldn't be shopping Airs for getting THAT sort of work done.

It snappily handles everything I can throw at it and keeps on doing so for far longer than I'm willing to sit in front of a computer.

They just aren't piggy the same way an 8GB Wintel machine is.

 

[plectrum]

$699 at £1=$1.27 = £550
+VAT at 20% =£660
Shipped via freight forwarder in Florida, no US sales tax
let's guess package weight at 2kg
Freight forwarding ~$60 = £57 inc VAT (need to check insurance)
Total £716

Cheapest M2 MBA from Apple £999

Still a good deal...

Not really. You forgot to add customs.

There is 0% duty on laptops and forwarding services operate Delivery Duty Paid, which means you pay the VAT to them and the package doesn't need to be stopped by customs. That's all included in the figures above.

You can still buy new M1 Air in Europe on sale from independent retailers, just like from Walmart. I saw some for 800€ a month ago. The more usual price right now is around 850€ (£730), which is pretty comparable to your quote, but without all that forwarding hassle. And unlike the grey import from US, you get the full two year minimum warranty on it.

On eBay UK the refurbs are of a similar price to this new. The used ones are less, but they're used. New at UK retailers are £800+.

Warranty wise, depends how much support Apple will give you for a grey import.

 

[DovePig]

There is 0% duty on laptops and forwarding services operate Delivery Duty Paid, which means you pay the VAT to them and the package doesn't need to be stopped by customs. That's all included in the figures above.

On eBay UK the refurbs are of a similar price to this new. The used ones are less, but they're used. New at UK retailers are £800+.

Warranty wise, depends how much support Apple will give you for a grey import.

OK then, didn't know that. I was operating with my local EU prices and tax/customs rules where I thought the grey import wouldn't be so great, since the OP mentioned euros and I assumed EU. Not really acquainted with latest UK prices, after the Old Blighty seceded from that (which cut both ways, as I really loved a few UK‑made brands no longer that economical to import here into the EU now, damn).

Warranty wise, Apple still gives you at most 1 year if they honour the grey import (I imagine they would, why not), while buying in the EU still gives you the full 2+ years (depends on the country, Spain has three years IIRC) enforced by law, with all its mandatory protections over a company's voluntary warranty.

But man, £800+ for an M1 Air still sucks. I'd probably go for the grey import then...

 

[Errum]

ETA: I don't repair, but I have recommended the base M1 Air to several people I know in the last few years. Every one of them has been blown away by the performance.
One interesting anecdotal trend I noticed with some quick googling, is that there were several instances of people migrating from Intel to apple silicon and using Apple's migration utilities, and then being hit with horrible performance. In a few cases, the person wiped and set up the mac as a new one, and noticed a dramatic increase in performance. I wonder if there were or are issues using Apple's migration utilities while going from Intel to Apple Silicon. Again... anecdotal.

I personally always set up new computer devices as a fresh install, no migration. I only use the OS-level migration stuff when I upgrade my iPhone.

I support several dozen Macs in our office, mostly laptops. We’re almost 90% transitioned to AS at this point. I use Apple’s Migration Assistant with only rare exceptions and find it pretty much flawless.

However any third party apps are going to be transferred as-is, and may not include Apple Silicon native code. If they don’t get manually updated, they’ll instead run under Rosetta 2 emulation, which will of course be slower (although not horribly so). That might explain those reports.

 

[gnasher729]

There is 0% duty on laptops and forwarding services operate Delivery Duty Paid, which means you pay the VAT to them and the package doesn't need to be stopped by customs. That's all included in the figures above.

On eBay UK the refurbs are of a similar price to this new. The used ones are less, but they're used. New at UK retailers are £800+.

Warranty wise, depends how much support Apple will give you for a grey import.

Apple (the manufacturer) will give you the US warranty. Since there is no European seller, Apple USA won’t give you your EU statutory rights.

 

[saanaito]

This seems like the perfect entrance into macOS land, which is perfect for budding developers or tech enthusiasts. If your credit is good enough, you could potentially get by with paying only $36 per month (but that’s on the 24 month plan, so you end up paying a total of $836; you decide whether that’s worth the tradeoff), so it’s accessible even for some relatively low-income buyers.

Unfortunately, I’ve already destroyed my credit through medical debt, so no MacBook for me.

 

[SeanJW]

Apple (the manufacturer) will give you the US warranty. Since there is no European seller, Apple USA won’t give you your EU statutory rights.

That's a strict reading of the law. However in practice, Apple has a very loose practical handling of it and just applies local considerations. Go into an Apple Store and they'll just go "eh, two years". Hell, even for things not actually covered by warranty or you're outside any warranty for they frequently just deal with it for good will.

Edit: Basically getting involved with local complaints even if you'll eventually win is usually not worth the cost for a few hundred dollars or so of repairs. There's enough margins to suck it up.

 

[studentx]

It is possible to sideload windows on MacBook, it's a hassle but doable.

Windows 11 (arm) in a VM is all that’s possible. Works great. No lag.

 

[TimeToTilt]

I wonder why Apple had such a large number of leftover M1s. This isn't a grey market situation. They're new and AppleCare is available.

Different nodes, screens etc. May not be leftovers, continuing to produce them wouldn't be that complex and it would improve market share and penetration

 

[Rooky3]

It’s probably because of the way that every single time a MacBook thread appears on Ars the comments are flooded with people talking about how their laptops were excellent purchases that handle everything thrown at them. It’s almost as if their lived experience didn’t take into account that 8 is smaller than 16! Madness!

Actually 8 can be bigger than 16, let me explain. The Apple Mx silicon combines the CPU, GPU and RAM into a system-in-a package design, so it is highly efficient in its use of RAM. Therefore it is entirely possible that a M1 8 RAM chip is more efficient than a separated architecture, such as 16 RAM with an Intel processor. Shared memory has its advantages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1
Should also add, that tests have been made between M1 8 and 16 RAM chips, with the difference being relatively small. Sorry that the below article is in French, but the tabulated results are English readable: Xcode benchmark 135 vs. 122; Lightroom 3 minutes vs. 2minutes 43 seconds.

https://www.macg.co/mac/2020/11/la-...e-que-loption-16-go-est-rarement-utile-118017

 

[gnasher729]

Actually 8 can be bigger than 16, let me explain. The Apple Mx silicon combines the CPU, GPU and RAM into a system-in-a package design, so it is highly efficient in its use of RAM. Therefore it is entirely possible that a M1 8 RAM chip is more efficient than a separated architecture, such as 16 RAM with an Intel processor. Shared memory has its advantages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1
Should also add, that tests have been made between M1 8 and 16 RAM chips, with the difference being relatively small. Sorry that the below article is in French, but the tabulated results are English readable: Xcode benchmark 135 vs. 122; Lightroom 3 minutes vs. 2minutes 43 seconds.

https://www.macg.co/mac/2020/11/la-...e-que-loption-16-go-est-rarement-utile-118017

8 MB is enough or it isn’t. With these tests showing 10 percent difference they seem to be at a point that is borderline, but arguably 10% slower for 25% cheaper is a good deal.

 

[Rooky3]

8 MB is enough or it isn’t. With these tests showing 10 percent difference they seem to be at a point that is borderline, but arguably 10% slower for 25% cheaper is a good deal.

May I point out that the examples given above are relatively heavy work loads. 3 minutes to do a single task in Lightroom is not your typical web browsing.

If I understand correctly, for the old architecture with separated CPU, GPU and RAM, the reason memory requirements go way up with intensive work loads is that the CPU and/or GPU are under full load, resulting in a buffer memory requirement to temporarily store the queue. With inadequate quantities of RAM, the buffer has to use slow memory (i.e. hard disk) which really slows everything down.

With unified memory (excuse me, not shared memory) the data (command lines or whatever) is not being passed back and forth between the CPU and GPU therefore the efficiency is even more pronounced compared to light work loads.

 

[Dano40]

That M1 Air is still more powerfull than most PC laptops at that price.

The greater tech world will never accept the 80% of users. Who don't game need Revit, AutoCad, or need to run a large AI model.

 

[OrangeCream]

Yep, thought this might be an upgrade for an OLD MacBook Air, BUT ...

HOW LONG WITH APPLE SUPPORT THIS UNIT FOR OS UPGRADES AND THE LIKE?

It's not like this is something Apple really WANTS to have hanging around.

The 2010 13” MBA saw its last OS update November 2020, so a solid 10 years. Since the M1 Air was released in 2020 it wouldn’t be strange to think even buyers today will continue to see updates into 2030, or 6 more years. For a $699 laptop that will continue to function even after receiving its last update, that doesn’t seem to be a concern.

So 6 more years. It’s cheaper than an iPhone and will receive as many updates. Not a bad deal.

 

[alansh42]

It just arrived and... Oh no! The warnings were true!

/s

Anyway, came with Ventura 13.5, it's upgrading to Sonoma 14.4 right now.

 

[Cuy]

I wonder why Apple had such a large number of leftover M1s. This isn't a grey market situation. They're new and AppleCare is available.

Maybe it's because they have a factory making them? Remember, this product was only "discontinued" on March 4th and the Walmart deal was announced on the 15th. Do you think it's more likely Apple and Walmart slammed a deal together out of nowhere the last week or that it was a planned transition of the product into a value retail channel?

It is a bit of an unusual move for Apple as I can't remember another case of them maintaining a product for a 3rd party after kicking it out of their own online and retail stores, but Apple is arguably long overdue for trying to grab market share with a higher value/lower margin entry level Mac to make the platform accessible. This is an awesome product for casual use and media consumption, as much as people who've never used a Mac bitch and moan about the 8GB RAM, I did a fair amount of actual professional work using a minimum spec M1 Air and it was generally far more performant than Intel predecessors with a lot more memory, it's basically a perfect portable computer, one of the best laptops ever shipped, and if not for the rapid appearance of its M2 and M3 successors it would still be better than nearly everything on the market.

This is essentially the same strategy they've pursued with iPhone, where instead of refreshing a top to bottom lineup with new phones for each price point every year or two, they keep a few years of previous iPhones in production and push them down to progressively lower price tiers, along the the occasional SE, for example the iPhone 13 is still part of the current phone lineup at $599 vs its launch price of $799. Apple has been building essentially this MacBook Air since 2018, with the internals revised in 2020 to M1, so all the costs are sunk, they're probably really good at building them, they've apparently slimmed production down to just one spec for Walmart and the marginal cost of keeping it in production is likely very favorable to Apple.

 

[simon5701]

This thread feels like an old school PC vs Mac flame war thread more than a decade ago and I even recognize a familiar user name, almost makes me nostalgic.

While we are on the topic of low end Macs, I think Apple could use the older Apple TV 4K design with a fan. With the M1 chip it would be a great machine for general family home computing.

It could hurt the sales of the iMac and the Mac Mini. However I think Apple could differentiate it by limiting its ports of increase its margin via upselling the storage and RAM. It could also open up a new segment of business clients.

 

[stormcrash]

This thread feels like an old school PC vs Mac flame war thread more than a decade ago and I even recognize a familiar user name, almost makes me nostalgic.

While we are on the topic of low end Macs, I think Apple could use the older Apple TV 4K design with a fan. With the M1 chip it would be a great machine for general family home computing.

It could hurt the sales of the iMac and the Mac Mini. However I think Apple could differentiate it by limiting its ports of increase its margin via upselling the storage and RAM. It could also open up a new segment of business clients.

Oh wow I never realized that the 2021 4k apple tv had a fan in it. No wonder they introduced an updated model the next year, apple is already allergic to fans but a fan in a home theater device where silence is strongly desired must have really had them unhappy

It is kind of surprising that apple never redesigned the shell of the Mac mini to be smaller though. They're using the same size enclosure as when the min shipped with a spinning hard disc and an optical drive despite now integrating pretty much everything. Maybe it's good for heat dissipation or something? Or perhaps just to give more space for ports?

 

[zogus]

I’ve literally run a Windows 11 VM, with 8GB RAM allocated, on top of Mac OS. Same results. Applications under both OS’s work as expected and moving back and forth is seamless. M2 Air 8GB here.

I don’t pretend to understand why, but Windows has always seemed to be able to make do with much less allocated memory under Parallels than it would need on bare metal. Way back when I had a 4GB 2011 MBA, I was running Win7 on it with 800MB allocated to it in order to run several legacy applications. It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, but in reality it worked just fine. Later, I ran Win10 on a 16GB 2017 MBP with 3GB allocated to it to run similar tasks. Again, it worked fine—in fact, it seemed to work just fine even with 2GB; the extra GB was just for insurance.

 

[SavedByTechnology]

Any Intel Mac available? Yes and no. Did Apple spend the last 2 years before releasing the M1 by hamstringing and demolishing the performance ceiling of their Intel laptops? Yes they did. Demonstrably so, history shows how much of a shit show 2016-2020 was for MacBooks/airs and MacBook Pros. Scissorgate, SSD failures, horrible drivers on launch, terrible thermals etc.

Now was the M1 air faster than a 2019/18 MB Air, maybe, probably in most M1 calibrated/ software compatible benchmarks. But was it faster than the MBP Intel 2019 with a GPU? No.

But you said ‘any’. So stands to reason you meant any MacBook

I said any comparable laptop, not available Mac.

 

[Cuy]

This thread feels like an old school PC vs Mac flame war thread more than a decade ago and I even recognize a familiar user name, almost makes me nostalgic.

While we are on the topic of low end Macs, I think Apple could use the older Apple TV 4K design with a fan. With the M1 chip it would be a great machine for general family home computing.

It could hurt the sales of the iMac and the Mac Mini. However I think Apple could differentiate it by limiting its ports of increase its margin via upselling the storage and RAM. It could also open up a new segment of business clients.

If Apple wanted to go this route, forget about M1, they could boot macOS on the A15 Bionic in the AppleTV, remember the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit was a Mac mini with the A12Z that was in iPad Pro at the time?

For whatever reason Apple doesn't seem to want to go for a really cheap and small headless Mac, the mini has seen decent price cuts since M1 was introduced, but at $599 is only $100 less than their cheapest laptop at $699. Sure, that mini is a generation newer, but a MacBook Air is a more complex and expensive product to produce and includes the keyboard, trackpad and display which Apple doesn't exactly sell cheaply as accessories.

With Apple Silicon there is all kinds of potential for tiny Macs, they could go back to doing keyboards with a computer inside like the Apple II, stick style computers, Apple embedded development boards for hobbyists like a bougie Arduino, but Apple doesn't seem to want to get creative with the Mac lineup.

 

[SeanJW]

I said any comparable laptop, not available Mac.

Speaking as someone who owns a "MacBook Air, Retina, 13-inch, 2019" with comparable specs to the base M1 air (8G/256G, same as my previous MacBook 12" 2015, same as my previous MacBook Pro 13" 2010....), and uses more modern ones professionally .... the AS ones at their absolute worst eat the comparable Intel ones alive. Even running x86 through Rosetta 2.

 

[Cuy]

Any Intel Mac available? Yes and no. Did Apple spend the last 2 years before releasing the M1 by hamstringing and demolishing the performance ceiling of their Intel laptops? Yes they did. Demonstrably so, history shows how much of a shit show 2016-2020 was for MacBooks/airs and MacBook Pros. Scissorgate, SSD failures, horrible drivers on launch, terrible thermals etc.

Now was the M1 air faster than a 2019/18 MB Air, maybe, probably in most M1 calibrated/ software compatible benchmarks. But was it faster than the MBP Intel 2019 with a GPU? No.

But you said ‘any’. So stands to reason you meant any MacBook

Yeah, any. I went from using one of the Core i9 MacBook Pros with the optional Radeon upsell and 32GB to a minimum spec M1 and for some of the software I was using the M1 was faster running the same apps under Rosetta.

I'm sure you could find a case where the Intel was faster for a specific task especially for memory-bound tasks, but in terms of most desktop applications, most of the time, the subjective experience and the responsiveness, the worst Apple Silicon Mac was absolutely better in many circumstances than any Intel Mac, I couldn't stand using the Intel anymore after using an M1 Air.

I'll grant you that the Touch Bar generation of MacBooks were absolute dog**** and Apple allowed the Mac to turn into a genuinely mediocre product for too long. Fortunately they were working on it. On the other hand, keep in mind that Intel completely lost their way during that timeframe and failed to deliver on their roadmap and basically rug-pulled Apple on their expectations for performance and power efficiency for that generation of Mac laptops. The entire PC industry went nowhere CPU performance wise for several years.

Could Apple have scrambled and redesigned the Macs to accommodate? Sure, and to a limited extent they did with the revised 16" Intel Touch Bar MacBook Pro, but at that point from their internal development and roadmap's point of view Intel was already dead.

 

[Cuy]

That M1 Air is still more powerfull than most PC laptops at that price.

If it wasn't for the M2 and M3 MacBooks this would still be on the very short list of best laptops available, period. Now it's only slightly further down the list behind its successors.

 

[simon5701]

Oh wow I never realized that the 2021 4k apple tv had a fan in it. No wonder they introduced an updated model the next year, apple is already allergic to fans but a fan in a home theater device where silence is strongly desired must have really had them unhappy

It is kind of surprising that apple never redesigned the shell of the Mac mini to be smaller though. They're using the same size enclosure as when the min shipped with a spinning hard disc and an optical drive despite now integrating pretty much everything. Maybe it's good for heat dissipation or something? Or perhaps just to give more space for ports?

The Apple TV 4K had a fan for 5 years, 2017 - 2022. Apple probably just wanted to reduce the complexity and the cost while making it smaller since the Apple TV didn't really need a fan anymore as the 2021 version already moved to the iPhone chip instead of the beefier iPad chip used earlier.

For Mac mini I would guess redesigning the shell and the manufacturing process isn't really worth it or at least not the highest priority given the relatively low volume of Mac Minis sold. It is wasteful but the Mini probably has a higher per-unit gross margin than the Apple TV.

If Apple wanted to go this route, forget about M1, they could boot macOS on the A15 Bionic in the AppleTV, remember the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit was a Mac mini with the A12Z that was in iPad Pro at the time?

For whatever reason Apple doesn't seem to want to go for a really cheap and small headless Mac, the mini has seen decent price cuts since M1 was introduced, but at $599 is only $100 less than their cheapest laptop at $699. Sure, that mini is a generation newer, but a MacBook Air is a more complex and expensive product to produce and includes the keyboard, trackpad and display which Apple doesn't exactly sell cheaply as accessories.

With Apple Silicon there is all kinds of potential for tiny Macs, they could go back to doing keyboards with a computer inside like the Apple II, stick style computers, Apple embedded development boards for hobbyists like a bougie Arduino, but Apple doesn't seem to want to get creative with the Mac lineup.

That's a good point. My assumption was Apple wouldn't want to go lower than the M1 performance for a desktop machine and adding an additional SoC type to support for macOS is still more work going forward. The M1 is everywhere and the old Apple TV 4K has a fan already so why not just use it.

However I see the potential of a newer iPhone chip or even the A17 Pro chip being good enough. Although I wonder if at this point the M1 might be cheaper than the latest iPhone chips.

 

[stormcrash]

If Apple wanted to go this route, forget about M1, they could boot macOS on the A15 Bionic in the AppleTV, remember the Apple Silicon Developer Transition Kit was a Mac mini with the A12Z that was in iPad Pro at the time?

For whatever reason Apple doesn't seem to want to go for a really cheap and small headless Mac, the mini has seen decent price cuts since M1 was introduced, but at $599 is only $100 less than their cheapest laptop at $699. Sure, that mini is a generation newer, but a MacBook Air is a more complex and expensive product to produce and includes the keyboard, trackpad and display which Apple doesn't exactly sell cheaply as accessories.

With Apple Silicon there is all kinds of potential for tiny Macs, they could go back to doing keyboards with a computer inside like the Apple II, stick style computers, Apple embedded development boards for hobbyists like a bougie Arduino, but Apple doesn't seem to want to get creative with the Mac lineup.

To be a bit fair to the $699 air price and compare discounts to discounts Best Buy often has the M2 mini discounted by $100 making it $499 for the M2 mini and $699 for the Walmart M1 Air

 

[StuiWooi]

The m1 air was not good when it was first released and it’s not now. There are good Apple laptops of course, but there are many stinkers and handicapped years. This laptop is worth maybe 200 to 300 new.

I'm staunchly anti-Apple, but even to me this is an incredibly bad take

 

[Deleted member 545801]

The Apple TV 4K had a fan for 5 years, 2017 - 2022. Apple probably just wanted to reduce the complexity and the cost while making it smaller since the Apple TV didn't really need a fan anymore as the 2021 version already moved to the iPhone chip instead of the beefier iPad chip used earlier.

For Mac mini I would guess redesigning the shell and the manufacturing process isn't really worth it or at least not the highest priority given the relatively low volume of Mac Minis sold. It is wasteful but the Mini probably has a higher per-unit gross margin than the Apple TV.




That's a good point. My assumption was Apple wouldn't want to go lower than the M1 performance for a desktop machine and adding an additional SoC type to support for macOS is still more work going forward. The M1 is everywhere and the old Apple TV 4K has a fan already so why not just use it.

However I see the potential of a newer iPhone chip or even the A17 Pro chip being good enough. Although I wonder if at this point the M1 might be cheaper than the latest iPhone chips.

The Mac Mini also has a gigantic market of schools, server farms, etc, that have designed their desks and server racks around the Mac Mini using the same enclosure for the past ten+ years. That is the Mac Mini's actual market, and changing the enclosure for the sake of change would be a huge disruption for them with almost zero upside.

 

[OrangeCream]

I'm staunchly anti-Apple, but even to me this is an incredibly bad take

You can be anti-Apple and still recognize that their technical prowess is real.

 

[macosandlinux]

I think it’s a combination of many factors. They are likely be making a decent margin as the tooling, R&D, etc. has all been amortised fully by now and even the silicon is using an older node than the later M-series. Don’t underestimate how much this is a gateway drug into the Apple ecosystem either, as it’s reached the impulse-buy level for many and the M1 Air has a reputation most tech companies would kill for in one of their products.

Apple generally take a longer term view, and having a new customer who might upgrade in 3-4 years time is regarded as a big win, especially as they can expect income from services like iCloud and the rest during that period. It’s difficult to see any downsides, apart from those who might have bought an M2 or M3 Air deciding that a M1 is plenty good enough for their needs. Still another customer into the fold, though...

Totally with you on that one. Any new customer to the Mac/Apple ecosystem is a win, no matter if they come from secondary market, entry-level or grey market. Sooner or later they will need to upgrade and chances are good they stay within brand.

Don't get me wrong, that offer is a strong deal for anybody that needs a laptop and does not look into gaming (and needs either Windows or can get by with Linux for it). Any student or more casual user that uses it mostly for consumption will be fine with it, light creative work can be handled by the M1 as well.

 

[panton41]

Totally with you on that one. Any new customer to the Mac/Apple ecosystem is a win, no matter if they come from secondary market, entry-level or grey market. Sooner or later they will need to upgrade and chances are good they stay within brand.

Don't get me wrong, that offer is a strong deal for anybody that needs a laptop and does not look into gaming (and needs either Windows or can get by with Linux for it). Any student or more casual user that uses it mostly for consumption will be fine with it, light creative work can be handled by the M1 as well.

Honestly, there's plenty of games that would work just fine on those M1 Airs. The Sims 4 is Apple Silicon native, and is among the more popular of high-end casual games, and could otherwise run on a toaster as long as it has four slots and a bagel setting.

 

[macosandlinux]

Honestly, there's plenty of games that would work just fine on those M1 Airs. The Sims 4 is Apple Silicon native, and is among the more popular of high-end casual games, and could otherwise run on a toaster as long as it has four slots and a bagel setting.

Plus you can always get many casual franchises working as iPad games/apps.
But it all falls apart (it did for me) if you pick what game you want to play, and notice it's 'not for Mac'.